After Dawn Part II: Natalie. Tired.

Not to be confused with "Nattily Attired" from fake staff credits during the old days of NPR's Car Talk. The first word of this second part's title references about three hours of my life on Saturday night. The second, about the getting home after. The latter was tolerable, while the first part was wonderful.

I left off last night's Part I   having just passed through the final of the 18 checkpoints to get into the Chautauqua Amphitheater, selecting a seat with a decent view of the stage, and then wandering off to find other friends in attendance. I quickly found Laurie, who grow up around here. She was in the UB law school class ahead of me though I did not know her at the time, but I connected with her through this strange group of band fans affectionately known as “Stalkers.” She now lives and practices law in North Carolina, I tried referring one case to her last year (unsuccessfully), but she seemed not to mind and I got a hug and a selfie out of wandering down to the seats on the floor:



She two from me, another Stalker named Colleen in the middle, and me in my usual selfie cluelessness.

I next found Carolyn, who I had not met before, after she had to bail on the 2022 Jamestown concert at the last minute. We did keep in touch after that; though I didn’t get a selfie with her, she got one of her own with Laurie and Wes, the friend from Buffalo who came with her to this show:

Other than the few I knew,  I mainly noticed the odd demographics of the audience. I’d say the average age in the whole place was slightly below mine, but a good 25% of the crowd was much older than me. These were most likely the lifers from cottages and day trips from East Aurora who had season subscriptions to the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra.  Oh, it was remarkable how many of the fogies just got up and left after Natalie did her first set- with the full orchestra, her band and three absolutely wonderful female vocalists accompanying her. (It would be wrong to call them "backup" singers because they were right up front with her. The featured one, who even got a few solo pieces in parts of the songs, is named Mayteana Morales. Natalie gave all three of them, the conductor, and everyone else on stage remarkable amount of appreciation throughout the performance.) But probably the old folks wondered what all this crazy rock n roll was all about and went back to put their sore butts in their cottages and their teeth in their nightstand glasses.

The rules at the venue were quite clear about not allowing any kind of recording or photography during the show, and for the most part I saw very little piracy going on. There'd been an incident reported from a show earlier on the tour where Natalie stopped her performance to call out an audience member who was holding up a phone recording right in front of her. I did get this one shitty illegal picture from the cheap seats, just to highlight how upfront her “backup” vocalists were during the show:

This photo, on the other hand, was one of the official ones put out by Chautauqua after the performance:

That white wrap came off about three songs into the first set. The sensible white shoes, gone a few songs later. Natalie was always known for dancing and twirling her way through Maniacs performances, and oh my she still does. She twirls, she strolls, at times even struts across the stage. She "conducts" the orchestra, she reacts to the lyrics, she percusses in time with the drums in the back row. She acts onstage; her rendition of her own song "Ophelia" was as much Hamlet of Shakespeare as it was Merchant  of Jamestown. But above all, she sings as amazingly as ever. I heard maybe one lowered high note the whole night; every word was perfect, every gesture in sync with her words and our love.

That last part about the words may be a bit of a stretch for me, because I only got this album a few weeks ago and I am still learning those lyrics. Early on, she held up a copy of her just released album, her first of new music in nine years- the vinyl version.  She joked about how during her 40 year career, we’ve gone from LP albums to 8-tracks to cassettes to CDs to the “cloud” and now back to vinyl again. At home, we are still firmly entrenched in the compact disc era, but I do miss the old school 33s, if only for their better presentation of the album art and the lyrics.  One song she spoke particularly about from the new album was a song called "Sister Tilly." The subject is a composite of the strong women of the 60s and 70s who paved so much for her generation of women that is now being unpaved. In particular, she lost two beloved Tillies of her own , who died in their 80s of COVID. I am now going to listen to it again and understand more of the message. She added a “Roe v. Wade” line to these lyrics that got one of the biggest cheers of the night:



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That song came halfway through the second set. She'd grabbed the abandoned wrap and shoes when she went offstage, changed into a red dress, then came back out and the two accessories lasted through about the same number of songs for the ending half of the performance. In between sets, the staff was accommodating about letting even us cheap-seaters explore close to the stage- unlike at certain baseball stadiums I'd rather not Met-ion:P  The performers often leave setlists laying about; we had intel from previous concerts and from a current Maniac that she would not be including any of their pre-solo material except for one song, "Verdi Cries." She indeed introduced that one as "a song I wrote when I was 19," and the other band members were not involved in its creation.

Sure enough, it was the only one from her 10KM past in either set:



All except "Verdi" covering her entire post-Maniacal recording career, from her first solo album Tiger Lily through the just-released Keep Your Courage. That said, our intel did not cover the encores. First was "Carnival," also from her best-for-her-selling solo debut; and there was a clue to what might follow when I walked the edge of the stage grabbing those setlist shots:



She had a talented pianist on many numbers, but there was no other keyboard instrument except this laying next to the upright. Might this be what she planned to work in the quintessential organ riff from the start of "These Are Days," the biggest song from the final album of her Maniac era?  Well, he never touched the squeezebox- but they ended with that song anyway- all thousands of us remaining singing along with every note, feeling every feel right along with her.  At least one of her former bandmates was later reported to be in attendance, as was some guy from some other hit 90s band named Michael Stipe.

Neither came up and sang. Neither had to. Natalie was 'nuff.

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My only goal after those final songs was to find my car (my keys being glued to my inner thigh the whole day and night) and get the hell home.  Somehow I'd kept a solitary 1 percent of charge on my phone, but that was enough to capture the QR code for streams of their upcoming lectures (we may watch Anna Devere Smith next month) and, if necessary, follow the bread crumbs of signs and landmarks I'd taken pictures of on my way from the far reaches of the car park.  It wasn't necessary; the lot was well lit, the signs to "green parking" and Row 5 sufficient, and the crossing guard tipped us to a back exit that would get us back to the highway and eventually the 90 much sooner. All good. Nothing lost, good time getting back, I even got to listen to the west coast Mets game for the final hour. 

Okay, so it wasn't ALL perfect that night- or the following afternoon when they would lose their second straight game of July after winning the first six.  I didn't care about either though, compared to the love of music and company I felt both that night and at a closer, smaller but just as memorable show the next afternoon.

Which will be, Part III....